April Reading Highlights

Reading! Reading! Reading! I think I may have overdosed on books.

Working in a publishing house is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me, but it is also quite emotionally distressing. There are books everywhere, all around me, and I want to read them all but I can NEVER read them all. It torments me.

So what I'm realising is that I am never, realistically, going to be able to post reviews of every book I read here any more. In the last few weeks I have been reading about a book a day. So I'm reducing down again, to just the pick of the bunch. These are the books I've been evangelising about in the last month.

First, I have managed to do a review for The Bookbag: of Jenni Fagan's utterly, madly, stunningly brilliant The Panopticon. I five-starred it, and would five star again.

And the best of the rest:

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

I am ashamed to admit that it has taken me three years to read this book. I don't even know why. It's based on my favourite fairy tale, 'The Robber Bridegroom' (the English version is actually called 'Mr Fox', and it is my favourite because it contains animal people, grisly murders and a fierce girl detective who triumphs by using her brain). But somehow it never happened, until I went to the Granta Young British Novelists launch, heard Oyeyemi read and fell in instant and blazing literary love with her.

I pretty much ran to the till with Mr Fox and then fell on it like, er, Mr Fox on one of his victims - and oh my god, it's good. It's a mind-bogglingly smart collection of sharp, terrifying, stunningly well written short stories, all linking together to make up a battle of wits between a male writer and his female muse, an imaginary woman who has taken on a life of her own. Oyeyemi's writing is so bloody amazing, and what she's got to say about the way men control women is so true and (even more importantly) so effortlessly well expressed.

5 stars! 10 stars! How do I become friends with Helen Oyeyemi?


The Ghost Riders of Ordebec by Fred Vargas

I love Fred Vargas. I have nothing bad to say about her. Her mind works in such unique, charming, off-the-wall ways, and the universe she's created for her crime novels is both utterly delightful and full of animals. In The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, a pigeon is as important a character as a police officer, dogs need to be fed sugar at regular times of the day and there are a loving couple of rats who help to solve a murder.

Someone has been committing murders in the town of Ordebec, and the supersitious villagers believe that the culprit is Lord Hellequin, a ghostly rider who punishes the wicked by killing them and stealing their souls. Although the supernatural is never the real answer to one of Vargas's mysteries, there's an atmosphere of misty possibility that make you feel like you're in a slightly alternate universe. Vargas's protagonist Adamsberg is adorably vague, a cloud-shovelling policeman who has trouble remembering people's names and who didn't realise he had an extra illegitimate son because he failed to read a letter properly. This book, like all the others, is softly written but with a beautiful attention to detail and a quirky sense of humour. Vargas has a knack for creating characters (both human and animal, there really is no difference) that you instantly fall in love with, and her good guys radiate real honest goodness.

I think Vargas is the best thing in crime fiction right now. This latest novel is as good as all the others - and now that I've read it I really want a dog called Fleg.

4.5 stars.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Well, we can all pack up and go home. John Green's written the perfect YA novel and there just isn't any point trying to follow his act. As I tweeted at the time:

Just finished The Fault In Our Stars. I have been emotionally mangled in the most beautiful way. When I grow up I want to write like that.
— Robin Stevens (@redbreastedbird) May 2, 2013

Seriously, I am only exaggerating a little. This is just a virtuoso work of fiction, something that's beautiful and touching but also completely real in a way that most tearjerkers don't manage to be. The characters seriously read like people (real people, ones who are a bit mean and a bit small and a bit selfish, but still good), and so you can go from crying to laughing outrageously in about half a page. It's the most fearless presentation of the realities of suffering from cancer that I've ever read, as well as one of the best teenage love stories, and it has extremely light and intelligent things to say about everything from Great Literature to computer games.

One in the eye for anyone who thinks that YA is written by people who aren't good enough to write proper books.

5 stars. 

Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin

I went to the launch of this (launches, by the way, are the best things about publishing apart from everything to do with the books), and can confirm that Abigail is nice, fun and the same age as me (this is her second book. Yes, really). She is also an extremely thoughtful and imaginative author who has written a novel so compelling that I started it on Friday evening, had to be dragged away from it to go to a dinner party and then leaped out of bed at 7 on Saturday morning because I had to finish it now now now.

I really don't want to give away any of the plot, because so much of the book is about peeling away layers of secrets to reveal the even crazier secret underneath (it's a testament to how perfectly balanced and well-imagined Golden Boy is that when I tried to explain the plot to my boyfriend it sounded like something from Take a Break, like MY STALKER EX-BOYFRIEND ATE MY SISTER'S BABY WHILE HIGH ON DRUGS, but while I was actually reading it it didn't feel sensational at all). Suffice it to say, though, that Max Walker, the apparently perfect golden boy of the title... isn't. At all.

I'm seeing Golden Boy trailed in America as for fans of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which... I'm not sure I buy into. Sure, it's about a teenager coming of age, and there are some very nicely-observed moments of emotional resolution, but it's also incredibly dark and shocking - and it's got one of the most horrifying openings I've ever come across. I read the first three chapters, put the book down and said, "I can't believe she just did that".

Seriously, though, I loved it, and I think that Golden Boy's going to be huge. Quick, everyone, read it now!

4.5 stars

Alice Day

Come to my arms, my beamish readers, and listen well, for tomorrow (for reasons best known to itself, but probably involving the tourist season) Oxford celebrates Alice Day.

I shall be marking it by dressing up as Alice (I have the hair, it was inevitable) and handing out squishy and highly sugary cupcakes (I know this because I made them, I went a bit mad with the food dye too so they are wildly colourful) to children at the bookshop, but before I do that I wanted to take you on a magical mystery tour of the story behind Alice - because, little bats, it is a good'un.

Alice - the real Alice - and I actually grew up about 100 yards away from each other (give or take 100 years, but who's counting). Her father was Dean of Christ Church, and my father was Master of Pembroke (a much smaller and less impressive breed of animal, as colleges go, but nevertheless just across the road), so we both spent a lot of time playing by the river in Christ Church Meadow, and we both had our sleep patterns messed up by Tom Tower ringing 101 times at nine every night (I'm not making this up, this is the sort of impossibly mad and pointless tradition that could only be real in Oxford). But while I was generally left alone, free to hang off the top of Oxford city wall and throw bits of twig at passing tourists, poor Alice was constantly being pestered by a mad don who insisted on taking a lot of scantily-clad photos of her in her garden.

I'm not making that up either. Here is Alice Liddell, aged about seven, in a picture taken by Charles Lutwige Dodgson - which, of course, is the real name of Lewis Carroll. Whether he was actually a paedophile, or just very good at pretending to be one, is one of those things that Alice academics enjoy spending a lot of time arguing about, but at any rate Carroll is one of the long, long list of distinguished authors who would probably not pass a CRB check were one to be carried out today (See also Alighieri, Dante and Ruskin, John).

This definitely puts him on my own personal list of authors who were mad, but not in a good way (as distinct from authors who were mad in ways that I wish I had been there for, like Coleridge and the Mitfords). Working where I do, I have had a lot of experience of Oxford dons, and so I can say with reasonable certainty that he also smelt faintly odd and tended to get breakfast on his shirt and then forget about it. (This is, of course, very cruel to all the Oxford dons who are well-adjusted individuals. To all three of you, I apologise).

But despite all of that, I love the stuff that Lewis Carroll wrote. He's the absolute master of creating things that don't make any rational sense at all, but which your brain works out immediately. Jabberwocky, for example, has so few English words in it that it might as well be in another language, but all the same it's instantly understandable. Carroll's word games are just so beautifully clever, and funny about it too, that it absolutely makes sense that Alice has never gone out of fashion.

Oh, and in case you were wondering - that drawing from the beginning of my post is by Tove Jansson (she of Moomins fame). She illustrated the first-ever Finnish language translation of Alice, back in 1966, and for some odd reason it's taken someone until now to realise that they might make the English version sell rather well too. I think I nearly like them more than Tenniel, which is heresy but I can't help it. Here, at any rate, are a brace of Mock Turtles, to help you decide for yourself.

You're welcome.

Reviews: Go Tell It On The Mountain, Written on the Body and The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Ah, the silly season is upon us. Today a tourist asked me where to find pads of paper "like the students use, that say 'OXFORD' on them". I pointed out that students would probably use blank refill pads, like all other people, and she looked confused, as though I had shattered her illusions.

Then another lady asked where "the Mister Moss series of books are, that someone told me about, I think they're by an author called - Dexter?" I did not laugh, but oh god was it hard. I think I like this one better than the request I once got for How To Cook A Mockingbird.

Anyway.

Today I have three reviews for you, or rather two reviews and a short bit where I am rude about Jeanette Winterson. As I have been taught in many careers self-improvement sessions, I will sandwich the bad between the two goods, so as to cleanse it from your minds and leave you with a general impression of the four stars that I have given both of the books that happen not to have been written by Jeanette Winterson.

The books in question: Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson and The Lost Books Of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason.

First, the Baldwin. I've come at Go Tell It On The Mountain slightly back-to-front, since I read Giovanni's Room last month on a recommendation from my mother, expecting, goodness knows why, something a bit like a gay Good Soldier: beautifully written, mannered and full of characters with dark wicked secrets hidden underneath their detachable collars. Well, it certainly was beautiful, but otherwise completely unlike what I was imagining - it's written in incredibly clear, expressive, immediate prose, with a bastard of a narrator that you instantly sympathise with and a horribly compelling central story. My mother calls Giovanni's Room a "little gem", which makes it sound a bit like salad, but it's not such a bad description - it really is a gorgeous little book. I finished it, realised that I MUST HAVE MORE OF THIS IMMEDIATELY, and the next day rushed out and bought Go Tell It On The Mountain, Baldwin's first published book, written years before he got round to Giovanni.

First published in 1953 (which I guess makes this a classic review), Go Tell It On The Mountain is the story of a black family living in 1930s Harlem. They're all members of The Church of The Temple of the Fire Baptised, which is one of those all-singing, all-dancing affairs that takes the basic view that you're either a saint or you're damned horribly, and you're much more likely to be the latter than the former. The father, Mr Grimes (can you see the symbolism there?), one of the church's preachers and therefore a saint, seems to spend his days helping his children along to godliness by beating them a lot. This makes his eldest son John hate him intensely and then of course feel horribly guilty about doing so - since he hates a saint, he must be a terrible dirty person who's going to go straight to his father's rather detailed version of hell.

As you may already be able to tell, this is a book that has a lot of painful, mightily suppressed issues. The whole plot takes place within 24 hours, on the fourteenth birthday of the main character John (similarity to James Baldwin not coincidental), and most of it goes on inside its character's heads - John's, as he tries to work out whether or not he can be saved; and his mother's, his father's and his aunt's as they go back over the events of their (fairly awful) lives. It's all incredibly interior - one of those books where people just sit in a room and stare at one another meaningfully - but Baldwin's so good at understanding people, how they work and how they think, that you totally believe in his characters and buy into their inner lives.

All the same, though, the lack of forward movement in Go Tell It On The Mountain does get a little irritating at times. Internalised emotional epiphanies are all very well, and perfectly realistic - most of my moments of deep revelation about the course of my life have happened when I was half way through eating an apple, or washing my toe, or handing my ticket to the train guard - but all the same it's nice to have some sort of accompanying emotional resolution out there in the book's real world. Even the characters in To The Lighthouse finally got to go to the lighthouse, for heaven's sake. John never confronts his father about how horrible he is, for example, and his mother never tells him how much she loves him - they think all this in their heads, but nothing actually comes out.

This all sounds a bit like I didn't enjoy Go Tell It On The Mountain, but I really did. It's a fascinating story, beautifully and colourfully written - not quite as perfect as Giovanni's Room, maybe, but still a very worthwhile read.

4 stars.

When I was about half way through Go Tell It On The Mountain, I happened to leave it behind when I went for my break. Instead of running all the way back downstairs to get it, I decided to finally have a go with Written on the Body, which I have been eyeing up for quite a while. I've enjoyed the Jeanette Wintersons I've read before, and Written on the Body is pleasingly small and slight, apparently perfectly break-sized.

This was an error.

It's very rare that I don't finish a book - I've really got to hate something with exceptional fervour - but twenty minutes with this was more than enough for me. It's possible that Written on the Body gets unrecognisably better after page 32, but I decided that in this case I was perfectly happy to take my chances. The thing - up to page 32 - reads like some bizarre Digested Read parody of itself, and of snobbishly literary fiction about romance in general. I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have it in front of me any more, but the average paragraph went something like:

Then I met Helen. She was such a staunch leftie that even her nipples pointed sideways. She loved beauty but was committed to anarchy, which made her sad. I slept with her on a lilo to comfort her but afterwards she was still racked with fundamental doubts. She thought about blowing up some paintings, to show her contempt for the patriarchy, but she found them too beautiful so we decided to detonate a urinal instead. I went into the urinal first to warn the occupants - it was full of pricks. That was a joke. I made a joke! Or maybe I didn't. I'm so fantastically clever that you can't tell. Did I tell you that I've slept with a lot of people? Because I have. Boobs.

On page 32 I gave up, never to return. Two stars, I feel, would be far too generous for what this was.

1.5 stars.


And finally, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. I was lured towards it on the promise of my coworker (who has never been wrong about a book yet) and also because of its cover. I mean, look at that cover. That is a cover that knows its market and calls out to it seductively, like a high-class prostitute in a historically accurate toga. Classics geeks, this one's for you.

I usually don't like describing books by saying 'it's as though Grisham/Joyce/Tennyson/Atwood sat down and wrote a book with Asimov/Heller/Golding/Jodi Picoult', but, in this case, I have to make an exception, because The Lost Books of the Odyssey really is a bit like what would happen if Italio Calvino had written the Odyssey. It's classical myth filled with EXTREME POSTMODERN UNCERTAINTY - non-linear what-ifs, going round and round the original story - what if Penelope was dead, what if Odysseus was a coward, what if (my personal favourite) Penelope was actually a suitor-murdering werewolf. Or, to put it another way, it's 44 bits of really high-end fanfic.

This is definitely a book that works best if you know its source well, both because of how cleverly Mason picks up on little throwaway details from the Odyssey and takes them to their logical conclusion and because of how oddly shocking it is when he departs from the plot you know. Just like in fanfic, an alternative universe where a character is dead is interesting mostly because both the writer and the reader understand that they should really be alive, and that in killing them off they've purposefully messed with the strings of the story.

Because it is so similar to the Odyssey, and at the same time not similar at all, there's a weird, intense, dreamlike quality to The Lost Books of the Odyssey - only it's the sort of dream where your friend has someone else's face and you open your front door to find you're in a garden full of dark statues that turn to watch you as you go by. What I'm trying to say is, it's creepy. Mason's got an incredibly clever, eerie imagination - there's a story, for example, where Paris is Death personified, and Troy is Hell - and when the stories work, they work, like a punch in the (mental) gut. Unfortunately, though, sometimes they don't - Mason's far too fond of putting long words and complex philosophical ideas into the mouths of characters that they don't suit at all, and towards the end of the book I felt like he might be running out of ideas somewhat.

However, for the most part, what he's done in The Lost Books of the Odyssey is awesome. It's gorgeous, and stately, and totally different, and most importantly it's an absolute pleasure to geek out over, top-quality fanfic for people who (mostly) don't even know what fanfic is.

4 stars.

Reviews: Roots of Betrayal and City of Bohane

Customers are very strange. Yesterday afternoon:

Customer: I would like Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Me: That'll be downstairs in Philosophy.
Customer: Can I borrow it?
Me: We're a bookshop. All our books are only for sale.
Customer: So I can't borrow it, then?

And later:

Me: Do you need a bag for your purchase?
Other Customer: Yes, I do.
Me: Our large plastic bags are 10p.
Other Customer: That's outrageous! How dare you! Charging me to cart away your items! Disgusting.
Me: I'm very sorry, but it's company policy.
Other Customer: DISGUSTING.
Other Customer: *reaches into coat, pulls out plastic bag, puts in his purchases and storms out*
Me: I see that you really did need that bag, then.

Anyway, today I have two reviews - The Roots of Betrayal by James Forrester (who, interestingly, is actually the historian Ian Mortimer in disguise) and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (who, if you believe the book's blurb, is James Joyce in disguise. As far as I can tell, this is not at all true.)